


And Indeed There Will Be Time

by kerlin



Category: Alias
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-31
Updated: 2010-08-31
Packaged: 2017-10-11 09:08:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/110748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerlin/pseuds/kerlin





	And Indeed There Will Be Time

Nadia woke to cold.

Her cheek was pressed into the concrete floor, grains of sand prickling at the skin, and her arms were tied behind her back. Her knees were drawn up to her stomach, one doubled beneath her body and the other spread out painfully, twisted at the hip and numb from the awkward placement.

As awareness returned, the icy cold was joined by pain in nearly every inch of her body, but mostly centered around a pounding in her head and a mass of bruises on her torso and stomach. She'd fought desperately, but ultimately futilely; there had been too many, and they'd had the advantage of surprise.

Nadia tested the strength of her bonds and tried to straighten her legs. Each inch was painful, and she gritted her teeth against the pull of stiff joints and sore muscles. She had progressed enough to consider how she would roll to her knees and from there to her feet when the slit at the door opened.

The light hit her eyes directly, and she jerked back, scuffling until she hit the wall.

"You're awake," the woman said softly, a note of wonder in her voice.

"What do you want?" Nadia asked, thinking _that's the same way Anna spoke to me_.

"Not to have to hurt you," was the answer. "I don't think that should be too difficult a goal to accomplish."

"You don’t want to hurt me, so you kidnap and beat me?"

"I'm sorry for that. The men I hired were too…enthusiastic in their assigned duties." The accent was light and shifting, and now her voice was regretful but firm, steel inside silk.

The men who had taken her were dead. Nadia couldn't find any sympathy for them.

The woman opened the door, and there was no question of trying to escape; Nadia's muscles were still too stiff, she had no knowledge of the facility or even what country she was in. No sense in pushing this woman too far.

"You look so much like her." The light still stung her eyes, and Nadia blinked to clear out the reactionary tears.

"You're dead." It was one of the more cliché phrases to utter at a moment like this, but it remained true.

Lauren Reed laughed, childishly, as if delighted that Nadia would recognize her. "I am Lazarus, come from the dead," she quoted. "It was worth it, after all."

She stepped forward into the cell and knelt, the light playing in her hair as it fell across her face. "You don't understand, do you? Sydney didn't either. Julian did in part, but not truly. Not the way I do now."

Lauren announced her resurrection and spoke of enlightenment in the same way she would conduct small talk at a dinner party: cheerfully, superficially, but still with every appearance of deep belief in her subject.

"I understand," Nadia spat, and remembered the arching pain as serum made its way through her veins, the chaotic spiral of prophecy. It all came back to Milo Rambaldi, sooner or later. Her birth and life and now, it seemed, her death, would serve a higher purpose that everyone but her cared about.

Lauren reached toward her, and Nadia jerked back, unconsciously curling her lips into a snarl, a wounded animal doing its best to warn off a predator. But Lauren simply smoothed the hair away from the back of her neck, brushed her fingers against skin.

Despite the surgeon's best efforts, the scar had not been entirely erased. The shiny, pale skin in the shape of Rambaldi's symbol would stay with her for life. Anna had known what she was doing.

There was a reverence in the way Lauren touched her that sent fear straight to Nadia's gut, and she fought the urge to shrink away. She couldn't show any emotion that would give the other woman the advantage.

Lauren stood. "We'll start tomorrow," she announced, and closed the door, leaving Nadia in darkness once again.

~*~

Time became noticeable for Nadia only in her lucid moments.

She had developed a tolerance for the serum, as her father had observed last year. Lauren had to double the doses.

As a result, the visions were more vivid, and further reaching. She killed Sydney in perfect clarity, smelled the coppery tang of blood and felt the warm liquid on her hands when she rushed to her sister's side. She saw her mother in prison, saw herself as a child torn from Irina's arms, tasted the salt of tears in her mouth, as they must have been in the infant's.

All of Rambaldi's sordid history played out before Nadia's eyes, on her body, poured through her hand as she wrote. She watched him burned at the stake, saw his followers as they wandered the globe and hid his works, stood at a table with Joseph Stalin as he reached a hand out to touch a page from a newly-discovered manuscript.

She did not return to the cell; instead, she slept in snatches, in the chair she was tied to. She was well fed, but didn't have much of an appetite.

Nadia knew she had turned the corner when she began to resent her waking moments because they took her away from the times she didn't have to understand what was happening to her.

Her bruises healed and faded, and the skin of her forehead stretched against a small scar when she wrinkled it to test. She deduced that it had been weeks since she had been taken. It was still cold outside. Once, they had carried her to a bed to rest after a particularly large dose, and when her head fell to the side she looked out the window and saw snow.

"He works miracles, Nadia," Lauren murmured one day in a gap between pages. "Michael killed me. Rambaldi brought me back to life."

"Personally?" Nadia asked, tried to imbue the word with the appropriate amount of sarcasm, but it tangled on her tongue.

Lauren shook her head in exasperation, and Nadia wondered if she'd always been that condescending. To hear Sydney tell it, absolutely, but until now her sister had been just another biased source.

"Do you know the words Jesus spoke at the tomb? He said, 'He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.' For two thousand years fools have been waiting on that promise. Rambaldi will make it the truth."

"You're insane," Nadia said bluntly, and for a moment she thought she'd angered the other woman enough to provoke her into something physical, but it passed.

Lauren slid another piece of paper under Nadia's pen and tapped the bubbles out of another syringe. "Sanity is less important than you realize."

~*~

One day, Nadia woke in a bed.

She'd been in Siberia, watching a group of men and women battle against the snow and the wind to place a music box underground. More than half of them had died on the way there, frozen solid where they fell, and all but one died on the journey back. The last survivor, a woman, reached the village and looked back over her shoulder at the tundra as if she expected the others to somehow follow her. She had long blonde hair and cold blue eyes, and upon waking Nadia would realize that she bore no small resemblance to Lauren Reed.

She hadn't reached that point yet, however, had only processed the fact that she was lying in a bed instead of strapped to the chair, unfettered and sprawled over the comforter as if she'd been dropped there in a hurry.

It was the same room she'd been taken to a few times earlier. Each time previously she had been too exhausted to act on her freedom, but now she was curiously refreshed. The window was open slightly, and the breeze smelled like melting snow: spring was coming.

There were shouts from the hallway, then gunshots, and the last time she'd heard those sounds, she'd woken up in a cell. Nadia wasn't going to take that chance twice.

Mild atrophy, but nothing she couldn't overcome, she decided as she tested her muscles, swinging her legs across the bedspread. She fisted and loosened her hands, rolled her neck and shoulders, and then held still, counting down from three.

On one, she rolled, slowly, painstakingly, until her legs reached the edge of the bed and she hooked them there. A knob on the headboard provided leverage for her arms, and she was able to pull herself to a sitting position.

The blood left her head in a rush, and she ground her teeth together to keep from vomiting, took deep breaths through her nose. On closing her eyes, she almost fell back into the cold winds of Siberia: still serum in her bloodstream, then. Or would it ever leave now? The last time, doctors had spoken of permanent changes in her brain chemistry. Maybe she'd finally reached the tipping point.

Nadia laughed, tiredly, insanely, and opening her mouth was a mistake. Her muscles went limp and she fell off the bed, barely managing to turn her head to the side soon enough to throw up.

The gunshots were growing closer. She didn't have time for this.

Reaching up to the nightstand, she knocked over a lamp and it shattered, the sound muffled by thick carpet. One of the brass fixtures broke off, and she had the presence of mind to pick it up. It wasn't much, but it was sharp and jagged. It would rip skin.

This time when she closed her eyes to gather strength, she killed Sydney again, and couldn't open her eyes until the deed was done. She surfaced to hear herself emitting a low, keening moan, and repressed the urge to throw up again when the smell of blood mixed with the smell of the vomit.

Up, up, up, she chanted to herself. Sydney is still alive. You haven't killed her. You won't kill her.

To prove that, she called up memories. Sunday morning miniature golfing with Eric and Vaughn. Car rides home from APO with the music turned all the way up. Fighting side by side, smiling. Sisterly things, things she never thought she'd have the chance to do.

Nadia was on her feet now and with each step her confidence grew. To help that along, she remembered Eric, now. Teaching her the right way to bowl, pulling the visor down to block the sun from her eyes, making her laugh.

Two more feet to the door, gunshots getting closer, keep pushing, warm California sun, cold Siberian wind –

The door opened and Nadia barely avoided it, staring stupidly at the space that had a second ago been wood and was now man.

"Nadia," the man said, in a way she hadn't quite heard her name said before, and the last crazy thing she thought before she fainted all the way back to the fifteenth century was, _What the hell is Jack Bristow doing here?_

~*~

Nadia was lost in the swirl of color that was a ball at the papal court. Ladies were spinning and dipping, men were bowing and leering, and the decorations were dizzying layers of red and gold and cream. Alexander sat next to his mistress and watched his sons and daughter dance.

Over his shoulder, Rambaldi watched. His pale blue eyes didn't focus, or at least didn't focus on anything in the room, looking beyond the revelers – straight at Nadia?

No. Straight at a young woman standing in the shadows.

_Run, Sydney, run_, Nadia wanted to scream, but the girl moved forward into the light and accepted a hand to join the dance.

Rambaldi smiled.

~*~

"Nadia," Jack called from far away. His voice was urgent, desperate, and more than a little bit angry. It was more emotion than she'd ever heard from him.

She wanted to ask him what was wrong, but the only thing her vocal cords seemed capable of was "Unnnnhhhh?"

"You were dreaming," he said, tone once again neutral and emotionless.

"S-s-sorry," she stammered. Sibilants were going to require some work, but having pronounced the word successfully gave her hope. She swallowed and realized that her tongue and lips were cracked and dry.

Jack disappeared from her field of vision and returned with a glass. He held her head up and touched the rim to her lips, letting her determine how much water she wanted. She reached and wrapped her fingers around his wrist, guiding him as together they tipped the glass just a bit further.

Nadia couldn't drink much, but even the few mouthfuls helped immensely. "Where are we?" she asked, and was pleased to find that the lack of moisture seemed to have been her largest problem.

"Germany," he answered, and paused. "You were being held in Russia."

"I know," she said, and then blinked, unsure why she'd said that. Had she overheard a guard talking and only now put the pieces together? Nadia Derevko, she named herself in her own mind, who felt the border crossing in her blood, recognized Mother Russia.

There were too many things she felt in her blood now. She focused her eyes over Jack's shoulder at the bland floral wallpaper of the safehouse, and remembered Sydney's face on the girl Rambaldi was watching.

Jack was watching her, and even under a scratchy wool blanket, she shivered. Stop it, she wanted to say, stop looking at me like that. I'm not whoever you think I am.

"Lauren had more serum," was what she said. "I don't know what she wanted."

"It would seem that someone overheard you telling Sydney about your induced visions. Certain followers of Rambaldi believed that given enough…they were looking to create a prophetess."

Nadia didn't know how to tell him they had succeeded.

~*~

They stayed in the safehouse for nearly a week, and then they moved to another one several hours away. They stayed in Germany, where Jack did all the talking and if Nadia didn't know better, she would have thought him a native. His accent and performance were flawless.

At the second safehouse, she finally asked why he was the one that had come for her.

"Sydney and Vaughn were tasked with eliminating Lauren," Jack said.

Translation: Vaughn was at the edge, and Sydney had all she could do to keep him from jumping.

She didn't wonder why her father wasn't here. Director Chase would not have made an exception in the Rambaldi ban even to allow Arvin Sloane to search out his daughter. But there was one person she has to ask about. "Eric?"

Jack studied her for a moment. "He must have arrived at the apartment shortly after you were taken."

Nadia knew what he would say next, but she needs to hear it. "And?"

He set down the file he had been reading and turned to her. "I'm sorry." He paused. "It was quick."

She brought her hand to her mouth just in time to stop the whimper. Silence was imperative, Jack had told her when they arrived. The whimper would have turned into a scream, and instead she bit down hard on her fingers and curled inward, nearly fetal.

When she closed her eyes, Nadia opened them again in the desert. She stood at the edge of a hole and watched two men kill each other. At the moment of their deaths she yelled, but the wind picked up and swallowed her whole.

She opened her eyes again and tasted blood – she'd bit down too hard on her fingers and broken the skin. No tears, just blood, and a sense of being completely drained.

Jack was watching her with an intensity that belied his calm positioning on the other end of the couch. She let her hand drop to her lap and stared down at it there and then looked back up at Jack.

He held a hand out, telling her to stay, and stood up to disappear into the darkness beyond the couch. When he reappeared, he carried a bottle of antiseptic, swabs, and a bandage. Taking her hand between his, he began cleaning the torn skin of her fingers.

The antiseptic stung and the wounds throbbed dully, but Nadia welcomed it, used it as a tether to the real world. She concentrated on her hand so utterly that soon she was aware not just of the pain but the pleasure – the warmth of his palm as he cradled the back of her hand, the light sweep of fingers that brushed her thumb as he dabbed at the cuts on her index and middle finger.

Jack was slow and methodical, and she found the rhythm of his movements hypnotic and calming. Gradually, she relaxed her muscles and loosened her joints, dropping her feet back to the floor and letting her other arm drop from where it had been tucked against her stomach.

When her hand fell, it came to rest on Jack's knee. A thoroughly innocuous coincidence, to be sure, but the rhythm of Jack's ministrations was disrupted. Had Nadia not been paying such close attention to them she wouldn’t even have noticed, but all the same, it was there: a hesitation, a pause, possibly even a trembling.

Jack reached for the bandage and wound it deftly between her fingers and then around them, securing the entire affair with a few winds around her hand. He cut and taped and then he didn’t let go of her hand.

Nadia didn't dare close her eyes, for fear she would fall back into the waking dreams, but she couldn't keep watching Jack, either. Everything about this moment was too intense: the fresh grief over Eric's death, the pain from her hands, the taste of blood still in her mouth, and every pinpoint of skin touching Jack.

"Nadia," he said, and she threw caution to the wind, threw everything to the wind (the desert wind or the Siberian wind or the metaphorical wind, she didn't care anymore) and leaned forward to kiss him.

He kissed her back.

That might have been the most surprising part of the whole thing, because not only did Jack kiss her back, he kissed her in a way that told her he had wanted to do it for some time. All that intensity was now focused on her, and it was intoxicating.

This was real, more real than the pain she'd concentrated on before, more real than the dull grief she locked in the back of her mind. Anything would be more real than the world hovering just beyond her mind's eye, populated by fanatics and symbolized by Rambaldi's Cheshire cat smile.

So Nadia reached out and looped her arms around Jack's neck, twined her fingers through his hair, brought her body close to his, and let go of the reasons she shouldn't be doing this.

Jack responded. She wasn't privy to his thoughts and didn't think anyone ever could be, but she could imagine his inner debate and the vocabulary it was using: _wife's daughter, daughter's sister_. Before all else the incontrovertible fact that she wouldn't exist but for his wife's adultery.

"No," Jack was saying, and he pulled away from her, and she nearly hissed in disappointment. "No."

As always, his "no" held more than anyone else's: no, I won't be your consolation, no, I won't cross that line, no, this is neither the time nor the place.

Nadia was quite sure it wasn't "no, this isn't what I want." She realized then that wasn't her no, either: she did want this, more even than she wanted an escape. But there was no time to vocalize that. She'd never been shy about her feelings, but she'd never been forced to navigate them through such a complicated situation before, either.

Jack stood. "We leave in the morning." He left her sitting on the couch in the dark.

~*~

Giovanni Donato refused at first, but Rambaldi was silver-tongued and had the weight of prophecy on his side. The clock would be a masterwork, the mechanics of an intricacy unknown until Rambaldi specified what he needed.

Nadia watched from the corner of the dusty workshop, saw the light play against the wall as it refracted through the gold disk Rambaldi let play through his fingers. He passed the disk to Donato, who touched it gently, reverently, and held it up to the light, which shone directly into Nadia's eyes.

She winced away from the brightness, closing her eyes reflexively, and woke up.

They were at the fifth safehouse and she had fallen asleep on the couch, face pressed into the foul-smelling fabric. She stretched out and heard the door open. Holding herself still, she reached under the cushions for the gun she had hidden there. It was comfortably in her hand before Jack spoke the code word.

There must have been information in the most recent dead drop about Vaughn and Sydney's quest to neutralize Lauren, because Jack passed her a manila envelope.

"We'll be leaving from the Hamburg airport in the morning."

The envelope contained standard IDs: passport, poorly photocopied birth certificates and driver's licenses, all carefully manipulated to appear as if they'd been with her for some time in her capacity as American tourist. Nadia double-checked the passport: as a _married_ American tourist, it would seem.

She wondered if Jack would be Mr. Williams, and if so, when these identities had been created: before or after the aborted kiss in Leipzig. If before, then the universe was playing a joke on them; if after, Jack might be trying to communicate something to her.

Nadia was well aware that her theories resembled nothing so much as a house of cards.

On the other side of the thin wall, a baby began screaming at the top of its small lungs, and both Jack and Nadia winced at the same time, though Jack's expression was slightly wistful. He was thinking about Sydney, Nadia thought, and felt a hot wave of longing at the same time as she gritted her teeth in shame.

Tomorrow. She could last until tomorrow, back to LA, where she would have to face Eric's death and Sydney's concern, the sterile hallways of APO and the summer heat.

She'd have to find a way to tell someone – Sydney, her father? – about her visions as well, which were growing in frequency and intensity, but that felt too much like a concession to Lauren.

Nadia reached to the floor for the book that had fallen there – a trashy romance in German – and tried to concentrate on the words. Occasionally she read them aloud to work on her accent until she caught Jack watching her read with a look of unguarded lust in his eyes.

The baby stopped crying and the apartment was silent again save for the traffic outside, and Nadia let the book drop to the ground again.

A few quick strides brought her to Jack again, and this time there was no question of why she was instigating this. The visions were gone, banished by the need running through her, and if called on for an explanation she wouldn’t have had anything deeper than "Because I wanted to."

Sometimes, that was enough.

Jack held her so tightly it was almost as if he expected Lauren to come back and take her away right in front of him, kissing her so hard he seemed to want to brand himself to her skin. Her fingers ran into his as they searched for skin, pushing aside clothes, tangling in hair, and she found the hem of his shirt at the same time he abandoned her lips to sear his way down her neck.

She got his shirt over his head and was exploring bare back with her fingers, and he was reciprocating by running his own hands up her back under the fabric, and angled as if to pull the shirt off that way.

Gunshots –

They both froze instantly, and didn't move again until the third and fourth shots rang out. Then, they moved as if choreographed: Jack grabbed his shirt and pulled it back over his head while Nadia put her shoulder behind shoving the couch in front of the door.

The baby next door started crying again as Jack brought his gun to bear on the door while Nadia reached back into the cushions for hers. They both braced themselves, breathing heavily, flushed and riding an adrenaline wave, and waited.

Someone yelled in Russian, and someone else responded in frightened-sounding German. There was a fifth gunshot.

"Bedroom window," Jack whispered, "fire escape. I'll cover you."

Nadia shook her head. "I'm not leaving you." It sounded like a line from a bad romance, but it was the truth: those men were coming for her, for the prophecy locked in her head, and she had no intention of letting Jack die for her.

He seemed to realize that she was serious when he glanced at her quickly, and then nodded curtly. "Go."

She didn't make sure he would follow her, just turned and ran as lightly as possible, feet barely touching the ground, as she kept silent. The window slid open easily, and she stuck her head out quickly to check for anyone covering it; no one was, which meant that this was just a reconnaissance; possibly even that their attackers were acting alone on new information.

When she turned back from the window, Jack was behind her. She nodded at him, telling him that they weren't watching the window, then turned and pushed her out the window. Once outside, she began descending immediately, as softly and quietly as possible on the rickety metal.

They were on the fourth floor, and it was a matter of seconds to get down the fire escape. Jack jumped down the last story and once on the ground turned; Nadia leapt and met him halfway, sliding down his body and taking the time to smile wickedly before they were off again. As they exited the alley they heard shouts in Russian from the open window they had just exited.

The sun was just beginning to set, and they walked quickly down the sidewalk – not too fast, in order to keep wandering eyes from noticing them, but as quickly as possible.

"This one," Jack indicated, pointing unobtrusively toward a car – a nondescript sedan with a few paint scrapes and dents. He made toward the driver's side, but Nadia shook her head.

"I can do it faster," she said with a grin, and Jack tossed the lock picking kit over the car. She snagged it out of midair and had the car door open seconds later, then leaned under the steering wheel, stripping wires and twisting them in familiar motions.

When she sat up again, Jack was sitting next to her and the Russian thugs were exiting the apartment building. Nadia inched the sedan out of its parallel parking space and was turning against traffic when she heard them start to yell again.

No shooting now – they must not be sure of their sway with the local authorities. She didn't stay long enough to see which car they got into, trusting Jack to take care of that. Secrecy was no longer a premium, and Nadia pushed the pedal down hard and the car leapt out onto the road.

She had no idea where she was, no idea where they should be going, so she followed the path of least resistance: swerving around cars, gunning through green lights, turning as often as possible, circling once, twice, three times, kept circling until she lost count, left and right and back again.

She lost count of how many people leaned on their horns in anger, how many close calls there were as she slid in spaces that shouldn't have existed, how many lights they almost ran. Twice, she spotted the police cars before they saw her, and managed to slow down and settle in line just in time. While they waited patiently in traffic she fought the urge to crane her neck back, identify which car was following them, if there was more than one.

That was Jack's job, and Jack had made a brief cell phone call to Marshall at the beginning of their getaway and then sat silently, lips pressed thin together, gun in his lap, as he watched the Russians through the side and rearview mirrors. Nadia trusted him to alert her if they got too close: her job now was to use every degree of her superior hand-eye coordination and reaction time, to treat the car like an extension of her body.

"Turn here," Jack said abruptly, and Nadia had a brief and irrational surge of anger: did he know exactly where they were, and if so, why hadn't he been directing her before now?

It didn't matter, and she hauled on the wheel, crossing two lanes of traffic, missing the furthest-right car by a coat of paint, and then they were down the small side street – the perfect place for an ambush. She wasn't so sure this had been a good idea.

Within seconds, a second car pulled down the street behind them – they'd been closer than she thought.

"Slower," Jack commanded, and though every single survival instinct Nadia possessed was telling her to go faster, get out of this narrow, dark street, she slowed down to forty kilometers an hour – they were practically crawling.

The first shots shattered the back windshield, and Nadia ducked as best she could, hunched over the steering wheel, looking up to see where she was driving. It was an effort of will to keep her foot from slamming on the gas pedal.

Jack rolled down his window and leaned out to the side. He was perfectly calm; he might have been on a Sunday drive, interested in taking in some fresh air. Instead, he turned to face the car behind them and squeezed off six shots in rapid succession.

Nadia risked a look behind, and saw blood sprayed around two bullet holes in the windshield and the car sliding to the side: Jack's bullets had taken out both front tires.

"Stop." His voice was as calm and quiet as if he had been on that Sunday drive; now he was asking her to stop so that he could get a closer look at a view of the countryside. Nadia hit the brakes and stopped twenty feet short of the end of the alley. Behind them, the car continued to slide.

"Jack, it's going to hit us," she warned.

He just shook his head and watched the car, which was scraping the brick building with an agonizing shriek, throwing off infrequent sparks. There was no one alive to direct the car or slow it down. Friction would have to do that.

The car slid to a stop inches from their back bumper, and Nadia put her forehead down on the steering wheel and laughed uncontrollably. She began to hiccup, and then to shake, and then there was a second car in the alley – heading straight toward them.

"Jack!" she yelled, and incredibly, he was stepping out of the car.

Nadia scrambled for her gun, which she had dropped onto the back seat when entering the car. She threw the door open and knelt behind it to use as makeshift shield, and was bracing herself when she heard her sister call her name.

"Sydney!" she answered, stunned, and slammed the car door shut to run into her sister's arms.

Sydney was saying something about how worried they'd been, and so glad she was okay, and Nadia let herself relax for the first time in weeks – perhaps months.

When she surfaced, she saw Vaughn standing by the driver's side of the other car, watching her with an eerie intensity. Jack was standing beside Vaughn, watching her with a similar focus, though one not as easily interpreted.

"Eric – " Sydney said, and her eyes were bright with tears.

"I know," Nadia said, and finally, felt her own tears sting her eyes. "Your father told me." She kept herself from looking at Jack when she said that, remembering what else had been said and done that night. "Lauren?"

Vaughn answered that. "In custody."

Nadia closed her eyes in relief and almost fell back to eighteenth century England, lurking at the edges of the royal court, but snapped her eyes back open in time.

Not soon enough for Sydney. Her sister noticed the lapse immediately. "What's wrong?"

"I'm just tired. I want to go home." Sydney always accepted the easiest answers; in a way, Nadia felt bad for manipulating her, but in that moment, she needed to keep her sister at arm's length. It would seem that despite their absence during the escape and the car chase, the visions would be a permanent feature of her subconscious.

Sydney put an arm around her shoulders and led her to their car. They rode in the backseat together to the airport, Jack driving and Vaughn watching the city fly by through the passenger window. No one spoke, and Nadia was grateful for the silence, even if it meant her visions came to her like a skipping stone across a lake: tapping them, tasting their coldness and bitterness.

She wondered when she'd finally sink completely.

Nadia met Jack's eyes in the rearview mirror and couldn't look away. She closed her eyes, and fell back to the papal court, swirling color and light shining off gilded decorations.

Rambaldi smiled.


End file.
